In an ongoing effort at one of the largest and oldest music universities in Europe, the mdw-University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, an interdisciplinary and interinstitutional teaching module/seminar combination was co-conceived to bridge the thoughtworlds of music performance and music scholarship (see VanderHart & Gower 2022) and carried out in its full-fledged form by th eteam of Dr. Judith Kopecky, Dr. Chanda VanderHart, and Mag. Stephen Delaney beginning in fall of 2021.
Kopecky, VanderHart and Delaney are all affiliated with the mdw. Kopecky as professor of voice and head of the Antonio Salieri Department of Vocal Studies and Vocal Research in Music Education and has a PhD in historical musicology. VanderHart, now at the Department for Music Acoustics -- Wiener Klangstil, in her capacity as a lecturer at the Department for Musicology and Performance Studies (IMI) as well as a performing pianist and artistic researcher, and Stephen Delaney as a senior artist and pianist at the Anton Bruckner Department of Choral and Ensemble Directing and Music Theory in Music Education.
Titled CCC 'Content -- Concept -- Context', the module was originally designed by Kopecky as a path to enhanced interpretation and the resulting impact on artistic self-understanding and pedagogical agency and first was introduced as a pilot enterprise in the fall semester of 2016. Kopecky was originally interested in exploring how being confronted with new intellectual, scholarly activities affected how voice and vocal pedagogy students reacted and interacted with compositions and their performance.
The first academic year (2016-2017) was devoted to the opera Cosi fan Tutte by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Kopecky involved a psychoanalyst who worked through the characters and archetypes in the opera from a psychological perspective with the students, who in turn workshopped and co-created their own, hour-long, new collage-style composition. Scenes from Mozart's opera were recontextualized using a variety of spoken texts, including epigramms, poems as well as narrative and interpretative interludes. An actor was involved, and the entire production was presented at the University and then disseminated in several local middle- and highschools.
The in 2020-2021 Kopecky onboarded collague, pianist and coach Stephen Delaney to co-lead the module, which was devoted to exploring the Paul-Sacher-Stiftung in Basel. The Covid-19 global pandemic was too disruptive a force to lead anything of a similar scale as in year one, but they did manage a performance project involving six ensembles, each comprised of four or fewer musicians. Each group engaged with one of the individuals featured in the collection (the Sacher Stiftung has material from estates of some 100 performers and composers). They were guided to explore not just the work, but also the biographies and productive setting of whoever they chose, and then present their findings and performances in a lecture-recital format at the end of the academic year.
In 2021 Kopecky onboarded Chanda VanderHart, and the trio collaborated closely over the following three years, the focus of this exposition. Here, we lay out in detail the projects and outcomes generated over the academic years 2021-2022, 2022-2023 and 2023-2024. While the module and outcomes were both taught and performed in a blend of German and English language, the documentation in mixed media is similarly multilingual. During this period the pedagogical approach grew and changed. Instead of thinking and researching a piece or a person, students were confronted with a theme and associated world of thought in both a weekly musicological / cultural studies seminar and asked to develop and contribute their own artistic reflections / responses on an aspect related to that theme.
The projects were launched in a large group setting by the entire teaching team in one or two day-long workshop(s), where guest artists and researchers also regularly contributed. Current artistic research best-practice benchmarks and international perspectives were introduced, and this opening event worked as an accellerant, moving the creative and intellectual evolution of the students quickly forward. This proved transformative. Thereafter, students began to hone their own approaches, through iterative cycles of creative production, artistic and scholarly input, and personal reflection. Their work culminated annually in multimedia performance presentations co-created by students and the team, where the audience was explicitly engaged.
Notably, several students from each group chose to use their own artistic reflections developed within the CCC module(s) as the basis for their own degree thesis projects. In several instances, students built on their own work in from the module independantly, using ideas and approaches from the module in their own, personal artistic projects. For these particular individuals, this artistic-scholarly approach clearly transformed their own artistic practice and identity, with the CCC module serving as a first step towards developing a number of music students into emerging artistic researchers and pedagogues.
Final performance programme from the 2020-2021 'performance'. Due to the ongoing global pandemic instead of a life performance a film was created for internal use.
